Hannah Lavery didn’t choose the title of ‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’, the Edinburgh International Book Festival event the capital’s recently appointed Makar takes part in at the end of the month. The title comes from the name of one of the key poems in Blood Salt Spring(2022), Lavery’s debut full-length collection, and is one of the oldest poems in the book.
‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’’s evocation of Lavery’s love/hate relationship with the country she lives in had already appeared in slightly different forms, both in Lavery’s pamphlet, Finding Seaglass: Poems from The Drift(2019), and in her poetic drama, The Drift(2018) itself. The poem has also become one of her most popular works, being named in 2019 as one of Scotland’s favourite poems.
“It's a poem that people often request of me,” says Lavery, “so it’s obviously had a resonance, but I suppose it’s quite a big poem, in that it's talking about colonialism, Scotland's history and it’s place within that, but within it as well, there is a kind of a thread of the personal. It's a love poem. It's about vulnerability, and it's about wanting to belong, and the hurt of that.
“I think that a lot of my work is exploring the hurt of not belonging, or at least this collection is, I think, and having nowhere else to go to. As a woman of colour in Scotland, I always remember getting told to go back to where I come from, and I'd be like, I don't know where that is, and almost kind of hoping that they would tell me, like, Oh, I'd love to know, can you can you tell me where it is I belong, because that would be nice?
“What I realised with doing The Driftis that feeling of not belonging is a feeling that everyone understands. Everyone has a memory or a feeling or a knowledge or an understanding of the pain of not belonging.”
One of the comebacks of the poem came when Open Book, the organisation which runs shared reading and creative writing sessions, passed out Lavery’s poem to various groups, inviting written responses of their own.
“That’s been amazing, seeing all these different responses to the poem, but for me, it’s a love poem, and it’s a love poem to Scotland. I think most people who read it get that.”
Blood Salt Spring is dedicated to Beldina Odenyo, aka Heir of the Cursed, the remarkable singer and songwriter who provided the score for Lavery’s play, Lament for Sheku Bayoh, and who sadly passed away in 2021, aged 31. A poem for Odenyo, ‘Leaves Fall Gold’, forms one of Blood Salt Spring’s most poignant moments. While there is much grief and anger elsewhere in the book’s three sections, there is a lot of love as well, and by the end it feels like some kind of a purging.
“My love of Scotland is always going to have a little bit of an edge to it,” says Lavery, “but the Makarship is definitely a welcoming in. I think I've always felt like I've been at the window rather than inside.
“I think the heart of my work is belonging, whether that is just very personally with grief, or whether that's bigger about country, or whether that's belonging in the room, and how you talk about yourself. So I think my work is probably at its heart about that feeling; it’s about belonging, and the pain of not belonging, and the longing to belong.
It’s deeply vulnerable, I suppose, because of that. But, you know, I suppose art is really, or maybe mine is.”
Hannah Lavery appears at Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of Quines Cast: Live, Wee Red Bar, 17 August, 8.30-10.00pm; and Hannah Lavery: Scotland, You’re No’ Mine, chaired by Marjorie Lotfi of Open Book, 26 August, 12.15-1.15pm. Blood Salt Springis published by Polygon.
The List, August 2022
ends
Comments